


One who knows me

by Aesoleucian



Category: Covert Front, Submachine
Genre: 4th dynasty worldbuilding, F/F, Gen, I maintain that in crecy eval she is recruiting for liz's subnet exploration company, because why ELSE would you give that kind of test, murtaugh is also there. briefly., not compliant with crecy eval canon lol, put my fanfiction in submachine universe, the true origins of the subnet core!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:28:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24734662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: Where DID Agent Kara and von Toten go when they entered the Submachine? What would Agent Kara possibly do in there? Is there any chance she would meet Elizabeth? These questions and more, answered.
Relationships: Elizabeth/Kara
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	One who knows me

Kara is used to getting back into base by now. A few weeks ago the complicated locking system, involving a detachable valve wheel, a six-digit code, and a series of small carved seals was an irritating but necessary security measure. Now it's as routine as unlocking her front door was, long ago when she had one. It was a few years ago even before she entered this place...

She stops in front of the door, unnerved. Someone has installed a new valve wheel and turned it, revealing the slots for the seals. A code, not the right one, is input into the lock. Someone came here and tried to open the door.

She shakes her head. But they didn't succeed. More than likely whoever came here got frustrated and left... but there's a chance they're still lurking, waiting to see how she solves it. Kara's eyes dart right, then left. She can't see anyone, but that doesn't mean anything. She makes sure to block the lock and seal slots thoroughly before inputting the correct combinations, then quickly wipes the lock and stows the seals back in her coat.

The door opens, and she does her usual quick threat assessment. Her eyes land on a young woman, mid-20s, dark hair and skin, medium weight, sitting on Kara's stool, chewing a thick slice of salami. The woman is within easy distance of von Toten to brain him with any of the detritus lying around on the floor, or, failing that, strangle him.

The woman looks up at Kara silhouetted in the doorway, freezes, wide-eyed, and looks at von Toten as if for explanation.

"I mentioned my friend would be returning soon," says von Toten. "Kara, you look very intimidating standing in the door like that. Pull up a crate and sit down. This is Elizabeth."

"Did you open the door from the inside," asks Kara.

"No—well—" He looks at 'Elizabeth,' his eyebrows furrowing.

"I don't really know how I got in," says 'Elizabeth.' "I could smell food, and I was hungry—I've been wandering around for almost a week, I think. But Professor von Toten has been very welcoming."

Has he. Kara closes and locks the door behind her and goes to stand over the table/workbench, currently supporting a full charcuterie board. "I told you not to open the door for _anyone_ , von Toten. You can't take pity on people just because they say they're hungry. How do you know she doesn't mean you harm?"

"Look at her, Kara!"

Kara looks at her. She doesn't obviously have any martial arts training, but some people are adept at concealing it. The book bag sitting on the floor beside her could contain anything. Her clothing is rumpled and patched but must at one time have been respectable for a young lady in polite company. Her greasy hair indicates that she hasn't showered in some time, and the subtle shaking of her hands could indicate that she is, as she says, very hungry.

"I can leave," says 'Elizabeth' hesitantly. "I'd want to get some food and water to take with me, if that's all right, but..."

Meeting someone who is afraid of her in this way is new to Kara. When foreign loyalists or what-have-you are afraid of her, it's because she is currently holding a gun on them, or getting away with plans they desperately do not want her to reveal. Generally this fear comes with a good measure of anger and an adrenaline-fuelled attempt to attack her. The young woman sitting uninvited in her base looks like she is bracing to be bodily thrown out, or hit, but doesn't know what she would do about it if it happened.

Kara can neither allow her to stay and threaten von Toten nor, in good conscience, release her back into the subterranean tunnels they are all trapped in.

Kara throws off her coat, folds it over one of von Toten's crates of miscellany and sits down. 'Elizabeth' relaxes slightly and picks up another slice of hard cheese. "I still want an explanation of how she got in here."

"He didn't open the door for me, honestly! And I didn't know... well, the puzzle was a clue that there was _something_ behind the door, I could smell food, I didn't think... I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. Of course a locked door isn't meant to be entered by just anyone."

"You didn't unlock the door, therefore he must have unlocked it."

"Not at all! I looked up from my work and she was already inside!"

Kara will get to the bottom of this if it takes a week, but for now she will let them both believe that she believes them. So she says, "Hmm," and picks up a slice of prosciutto.

\---

She takes 'Elizabeth' with her the next time she goes out. As much as she is sure this young woman would love to be alone with Germany's foremost esoteric engineer, Kara cannot allow that. She will conduct her interrogation in her own way.

"How did you come to be here?" she asks, and then clarifies: "In this system of tunnels. You said you've been here a week."

"You probably won't believe me," says 'Elizabeth,' looking sideways at her, "but I'm not entirely sure of that either. I'm an anthropology student at the Royal Academy, and when I was, er, wandering around in the basement—don't look at me like that, I was bored and the Academy buildings are like a maze!—I found a doorway that led into the sewers. I couldn't find my way back out, even though I'm sure I retraced my steps. I don't know what happened."

"The Royal Academy of...?"

"The Western Kingdom."

"The Western Kingdom of...?"

"It's just the Western Kingdom! Where are you from?"

"France."

"What kingdom is that in?"

Kara stops and looks at her, frowning. No spy would bother to pretend not to know where France is, especially not one who appears to be speaking fluent French. Something strange is afoot. "It's a country in the continent of Europe," she says."I entered this place from Lisbon, Portugal."

"I've never heard of any of those places, but I'm not going to argue with you about whether you made up an entire continent, because I don't think it will get us anywhere. We just have to accept that whatever is going on here it's stranger than any of us imagined. You... you came here through a device that Professor von Toten invented, right?"

"Yes. It shined a light on the wall and revealed a door that wasn't there before. I haven't asked him how it works."

"It's a pity he can't make another one, even with all the scraps he has. I suppose he must need specialized equipment he can't find here."

"I suppose so."

"The machine that makes whatever food you can think of is very good, though."

"Mm."

They walk in silence for a while. Elizabeth hums a tune Kara has never heard and chews on a roll, kicking her feet against the uneven brick floor. Kara wants to tell her to be quiet, hasn't she ever learned not to walk so loudly?

"How do you know Professor von Toten?" she asks at last. "You don't seem to be... well, friends, really?"

"I'm his bodyguard," says Kara, although she'd rather not be. She has far more important things that need doing. There's a war going on, after all. "We were chased by German soldiers, and I can't allow them to get their hands on his creations."

"German," says Elizabeth. "Tell me about German."

"Germany," Kara corrects.

"Are you—France—at war with Germany, then?"

Kara isn't sure what to tell her about Germany. The name of the Kaiser? Its formation from the Holy Roman Empire? The currency exchange rate? She tries to imagine how an encyclopedia would explain it, and then begins.

\---

"So you _could_ have built a way home weeks ago."

"Well—if it opens onto the location where we entered, I imagine it would be a problem. Manfred... Manfred's men could very well still be a danger, and who knows whether Lisbon is an occupied city now!"

"If Lisbon is an occupied city, I will find out. It's my job to assess situations like this. Once I've determined whether it's safe, I can have you placed under the protection of the French government."

"No offense meant, but I'll stay here. I don't want the French military to have access to my work any more than the German military."

Kara is a patriot. Of course she wants the French military to have access to von Toten's work. But she'll have the opportunity to convince or abduct him once she finds out the situation in Lisbon. "I still want to go back," she says. "I have a war to win for my country."

"Of course, of course."

"So tell me what you need me to do."

Many times during the period when he's rebuilding his doorway machine, Kara returns to find him and Elizabeth poring over his schematics together, or Elizabeth fiddling with a component of it under his direction. "She's a quick study," he tells Kara happily. "I can't believe an anthropology student would be so handy an engineer!"

Kara can't believe it either, but she doesn't say anything. She's still gathering intelligence on Elizabeth. It's possible that she'll need to kill her, or incapacitate her to prevent her from following them out. She doesn't _want_ to; Elizabeth is a cheerful presence who nonetheless knows how to shut up when necessary. But Kara will kill her if she needs to.

Around three weeks into the doorway project—Kara has been keeping meticulous count, trying to estimate how the war is going back home—the machine is finished. Von Toten fusses over it a last little bit and then straightens up, satisfied and dusting off his apron with grease-stained hands. "I don't really know _where_ the doorway will lead to," he says. "Perhaps if we bring it to the place where we entered, we could find the same doorway that led us in here. Then we would know where we'd come out."

"Why not test it here first?" asks Elizabeth. "At least it will be a proof of concept. I don't want to lug it somewhere only to find that we forgot to insulate the wiring or something."

Kara watches, arms folded, from a crate in the corner while they prepare it and turn it on. If they do find the same doorway they entered from, von Toten's workplace may be watched. But emerging elsewhere in Lisbon could be even more disastrous.

The machine begins to hum, and the lightbulb flickers on. On the wall it illuminates the edge of a door, and Elizabeth quickly turns it to show the full door. Kara slides silently off her crate and interposes herself between von Toten and the door. "Wait here. I'll check the situation."

She cracks open the door about an inch and looks through. On the other side is a room filled with sand; some of it spills through onto the floor of the base. She stares. The walls are gray stone and the air is so still and dry that she cannot imagine anyone has moved there for a long, long time. This is not in Lisbon.

"So, where did it come out?" asks Elizabeth. She's trying to peer over Kara's shoulder. Kara holds up a hand to make her keep her distance.

"I don't know. I'm going to investigate. Stay here—do not follow me, Elizabeth."

Elizabeth rolls her eyes and leans against the wall, folding her arms. "Fine. But don't take too long. When you come back and tell us it's safe I want to see what's in there."

What's in there is sand and gray stone, and nothing else. Thirty-two chambers filled with sand, with no way in or out other than the door von Toten has opened. Kara returns perhaps twenty minutes later to report that there's nothing there, and Elizabeth runs past her to see, scattering more sand across the floor.

"You'll have to open another door in a different place," Kara tells von Toten. "This one is a dead end."

"I wonder..." says von Toten, but he doesn't finish his thought. He just sits back down on his stool and starts writing in his project journal. Kara goes in search of Elizabeth, to tell her to finish and come back so they can try another place.

The next place, from a door in the tunnel outside the base, is a single windowless room uncomfortably reminiscent of the strange room where she found von Toten's machine. She cannot help but imagine bringing that device through the doorway, asking for another door, and opening it onto that disquieting lightless void again.

Every place the door opens onto is enclosed: there is never any exit, or even any windows. There are corridors, sewers, mineshafts, bunkers, and tombs. But no possible way aboveground. Kara has to admit, after nearly four hours, that she isn't going to get home this way. She's bitterly frustrated and, secretly, a little scared. Is she going to live the rest of her life here in this network of red-brick tunnels?

\---

The thought doesn't seem to discourage von Toten or his new assistant. They decide that since a doorway can only come out somewhere with walls, they need to invent a method of transportation that doesn't require a doorway; something that transports a person's body directly. If either of them had asked Kara's opinion she would have told them it's a terrible idea. A person can look through a doorway to see what's on the other side before stepping through. Not so whatever other method they're looking for. But she doesn't stop them, because it seems so unlikely that they could succeed. She continues patrolling the tunnels, looking for any change. She still isn't sure how Elizabeth came to be in this closed network, though a vanishing door is as good an explanation as any, given what she's seen.

By the time the direct transporter is finished it has been seventy-eight days they've been trapped here, and Kara is going more than a little stir-crazy. She paces the limits of the tunnels like a caged tiger, checking ever more meticulously for weaknesses in the brickwork or concealed doors. Her note pad is vermiculated with maps, although they don't always make sense on paper. Some of the tunnels seem to curl in on themselves more tightly than they should be able to, or the distances don't match up.

Whatever the reason, perhaps they can get out of here. Kara sits on her customary crate and watches von Toten and Elizabeth assembling the casing of the transporter, following the wiring with her eyes, looking for faults in the solder. "Where will it transport a person to?" she asks. "How do you control it?"

"It's hard-coded at the moment," says von Toten. He wipes absently at his forehead with a sleeve. "It should take the person who uses it ten feet in that direction—that is, into the corridor. This is just a proof of concept. Later we'll try to add the ability to discriminate between spaces and non-spaces, which should mean we can teletransport directly upward, hopefully aboveground."

She doesn't completely understand what he's talking about, but she does understand that the work isn't finished. So she allows Elizabeth to test the teletransporter, running back in through the door before vanishing again. They all try it. Kara doesn't like the slightly nauseous sensation of it, the moment of disorientation, but she will certainly be the one testing it when the development continues. She will get used to it. Von Toten is, after all, far too valuable to be risked on such tests. And Elizabeth is... proving more useful than Kara expected. She likes her.

On the eighty-fifth day they are ready to try sending Kara aboveground, gradually changing the coordinates until the non-space detector, whatever that is, comes up clear. "All right," says Kara. "Wait one minute and then retrieve me."

It's only as she's pressing the button that von Toten's eyes widen in panic, and she catches: "OH! WE DIDN'T—" before she is gone.

She is in what seems to be a wood-panelled basement, in a narrow corridor through boxes of junk, paperwork, and strange devices. The paperwork seems to be an archive of budgets in a currency she doesn't recognize, but all the line items are abbreviated into incomprehensibility. After a minute she looks into the next room. More of the same. Von Toten obviously didn't add a function to retrieve the traveller, so she might as well explore this place and try to find a way out. Her plan after that is unclear; she can't imagine being able to find her way back to von Toten because the red brick tunnel system is so thoroughly closed. But improvising has always been one of her strong suits.

The basement, too, is closed, except for what could be a trapdoor in the ceiling of one of the upper levels. It has no handle, string, or lock, but perhaps somewhere there is a mechanism that will open it. Kara has seen her share of hidden mechanisms. Perhaps somewhere there is a telephone and a convenient note with a number to dial.

It takes her several hours to work her way through the interesting items in the basement, open the hidden trapdoor, climb up, and close it accidentally from inside, trapping herself in two small bare rooms. 

She didn't bring any food or water, because she assumed she would be here for a minute at most. She sits and meditates on her situation. She could wait to die, yes, or she could gather her energy and find a tool to dismantle the trapdoor. She gets up, and begins by attempting to pry sharp pieces off a broken typewriter.

She goes to sleep, exhausted, before she gets anywhere.

She wakes hungry and parched and goes to work again, now looking for any way to open the panel that conceals the lever that trapped her in here. Her time is spent trying to keep her mind off the fact that even if she escapes this room she will not escape the basement. There has never yet been a trap from which Agent Kara could not free herself, and this will not be the first. She will not allow it to be.

She works until her fingers blister and gets nowhere. She hunches in the corner, arms thrown over her knees, and thinks about the food von Toten could make her, hoping to salivate enough to wet her throat. Her head and her stomach ache and it's difficult to think. This is idiotic. She has gone longer without food before, if not without water. 

Nevertheless, when the trapdoor opens she jumps to her feet and does not stumble, brandishing the typewriter knife toward whoever might be coming up the ladder.

"Kara?" calls Elizabeth's voice. "Are you up there?"

Kara folds the knife into her hand and kneels down at the entrance. Elizabeth is peering upward, and her face breaks into a relieved smile when she sees Kara. "Thank G-d! If you weren't up here I'd have no idea where to look for you!"

"Why did you come here?" Kara rasps. "Now you're trapped too."

"We made a second teletransporter," Elizabeth says impatiently. "Come down! Did you really think we were going to let you get lost wherever it sent you? You should have waited, and I would have been able to get to you sooner! It took hours to figure out how to open this thing."

Kara climbs down. Normally she would jump the last few feet, but she won't be able to bear it if Elizabeth sees her knees buckle. She straightens the collar of her coat self-consciously and looks to Elizabeth.

"Well, we weren't going to leave you. We're friends, after all."

Kara conceals her deeply skeptical expression by walking past Elizabeth and through the doorway, back toward where she arrived. No help from Elizabeth there, then. "Thank you for finding me," she says.

"I'm sorry it took so long. We really should have been able to build a second teletransporter faster."

It's still a surprise that she came at all. Kara says nothing about it. She feels almost more resentful than relieved at the moment, having been rescued by a civilian who has the gall to suggest it was a foregone conclusion. When things go wrong in Kara's line of work, there's no promise of rescue. And Kara doesn't have any use for gratitude, only debts owing. 

Generally, she doesn't keep track of debts she owes. Only debts too big to be ignored, like for her home country. She could pay her life for France and not wipe out that debt, and she has made her peace with it. It's become more troubling now that she may not have the opportunity.

She sighs when she sees the teletransporter. Not in relief, but in resignation. She will be no less trapped in the red brick tunnels. But she will have food.

"We'll find a way out," says Elizabeth, with the confidence of the utterly naive. And yet Kara can't allow herself to be a pessimist either; if she doesn't believe she will escape, what does she live for? "Somewhere up there, there's got to be sky. We just need to keep looking until we find it."

And so the mapping begins. Above the basement, carefully calculated from its dimensions, is a bunker filled with spoiled potatoes reaching out for absent soil in the dark. Above that an armory that could date back to the Prussian War. It's Elizabeth's idea to assign each closed system a set of coordinates—another piece of evidence that she is not the simple anthropologist she claims to be? But this idea reveals that in all directions there are more strange abandoned underground places, and nothing else. They are not beneath Lisbon, nor anywhere under the Western Kingdom. They are in a place that has never been described before, by science nor by poetry.

\---

Elizabeth is missing. She was to take the thought-machine and dream up an exit, or at least a new tunnel, while Kara was helping von Toten organize his collection of detritus. She has now been gone for three hours, and Kara wants a break from moving heavy boxes around. "I'm going to see where she's gone," she tells von Toten, and he nods, leaning back against the wall and wiping sweat from his forehead. "Perhaps she got caught up."

She leaves and looks to the right, where Elizabeth said she would be going. There is a short new corridor, coming to a dead end after perhaps fifteen feet. The thought machine is sitting on the ground at the end of it. Irritated, Kara picks it up and goes to search the boundaries of the tunnel system. In 134 days no-one else has appeared in the way Elizabeth did, but that's no reason to be careless with their only source of food. 

"Elizabeth!" she calls, through all the tunnels. There is no answer.

Is it possible to vanish oneself with the thought-machine? Kara would tell it to bring back Elizabeth, except that she knows already it would only make a facsimile. So she drops it back at base and sweeps the tunnels. Elizabeth is not there, not anywhere. Kara slowly becomes less irritated and more anxious. She has been looking for nearly two hours when Elizabeth steps out of a wall in front of her.

"Oh, thank G-d!" says Elizabeth. "Kara! Are you really here?" She rushes forward and tries to grab Kara's arms. Kara dodges her, and she draws back contritely. "I only want to make sure I can touch you. I'm not quite sure what's real right now."

"Where have you been?"

"I really don't know! This place is only solid sometimes, and sometimes I can see into other places on top of it, like transparencies layered over each other." She swallows, agitated, and Kara can see her eyes are shiny with tears, her voice a little raw. "Kara?" she says suddenly, and the oddest thing happens. Elizabeth seems to split into several of herself, each a little blurred, colored strangely. "Kara, where did you go?" she says, and begins to fade away. Kara darts out and catches her left hand, all seven of it, sweeping together the multiple copies into one solid flesh. The rest of her follows. Kara can mark the very moment Elizabeth sees her again; she sobs and throws her other arm around Kara's neck, and Kara is rattled enough to let it happen.

"Elizabeth, what was that," she asks in a low, urgent voice.

"I don't know! It's been happening for a while, I lose sight of things, only some things, and the walls stop being solid! There's seven of everything! Everything, Kara, you can't understand— _everything_."

Kara peels Elizabeth's arm off her neck, but keeps hold of her left hand. "Perhaps von Toten can make a guess at what's happening. Come on."

Elizabeth follows her back to base. She's clearly exhausted, still quietly crying, and sits with her knees up to her chest, nursing the mug of cocoa and whisky von Toten gave her. He puts his arm around her, and only then does she relax, as if the moment she stops touching another person she will vanish again.

\---

It comes down to this: he doesn't know what's going on any more than Elizabeth does, but because he's not quite so hysterical he can think of applying a scientific method to understanding its nature. For the next few days nothing is done except the gradual coaxing of Elizabeth's ability to walk through walls as if they weren't there. She seems to be able to see and touch versions of the world where those walls were never built, where rather than red brick tunnels this location holds a tomb or an abandoned laboratory littered with broken glassware. With practice she learns to focus herself into one or the other, and even to bring Kara and von Toten with her. There are seven worlds in every place, and though Elizabeth joyfully identifies one of them as a Fourth Dynasty sewer system, none of them seem to be from the world Kara remembers.

"Do you want to see the capital city?" Elizabeth asks, bouncing on her toes, all anxiety forgotten.

"That depends," says Kara (at the same time von Toten gives an enthusiastic "Yes!"), "on how certain you are that you can return here. I don't want to leave von Toten's creations where anyone could find them."

"We can bring them with us," says Elizabeth impatiently. "Just make a cart. We don't need to come back here."

"And you're going to find us a place to live?" Kara asks her. "Will we stay in your house? Do you still have a house, after you have been missing nearly six months?"

Elizabeth's face falls into a frown. "We can find a place. The King will make sure we have somewhere to live. People of science are very important to the Dynasty. He won't leave us out in the cold. You'll see."

By this point, Kara would endure quite a lot if it meant she could see the sky again. She agrees with no further argument, and listens to Kara and von Toten chattering with equanimity as they all move his things onto a cart. Von Toten is nervous about letting the King of the Fourth Dynasty know anything about his inventions; Elizabeth reassures him that he doesn't need to reveal what all of them do.

The way up into the Fourth Dynasty capitol involves travelling through three other layers, as there's no way to get a cart up out of a sewer. They emerge in the middle of a street, which Elizabeth immediately identifies as Rue Artère. The people on the street, all with dark skin like Elizabeth, stop in astonishment.

"It's all right," Elizabeth tells them. "We're testing out something new to show the King."

This seems to settle them, and a few give what sound like compliments, although Kara cannot understand their language. Why, then, does Elizabeth still sound like she is speaking plain French, when clearly they understand her?

The cart follows them up Rue Artère, past wood-and-stone architecture in an unfamiliar style under a blue sky that feels too wide and too bright, and toward the palace. There are not enough guards for Kara's comfort, and they seem to be there more to welcome petitioners than to secure the palace. If it were this easy to access the President Kara would stand guard over him herself.

The King's reception hall is colorfully decorated with tapestries and rugs. Elizabeth leads Kara and von Toten to the end of a short line at the side of the hall, where they listen to the King speaking to his other petitioners. His voice is soft but carrying; compelling. In many ways, in fact, he reminds Kara of President Loubet, even down to the style of his moustache and beard, although he is younger and his hair is still thick and black. To Kara's relief, two guards stand flanking his desk.

"What are they talking about?" Kara asks Elizabeth.

Elizabeth turns to look at her in surprise. "Don't you speak Huin?"

"No more than you speak French, although it sounds to me like you do."

Elizabeth frowns at her, and asks von Toten, "Then you can't understand anyone either?"

"No, Elizabeth, only you."

"Hm. Well, I suppose that's another mystery we'll have to solve later. We'll have to see about getting you both lessons. Right now that woman is telling the King about some new food processing technology she designed. She's asking to test it in one of the nationalized factories. The King wants to schedule a demonstration for later this week. And there she goes!" The woman bows and leaves, smiling. The next petitioner moves forward and gets down on one knee to bow to the King.

There are three more petitioners before Kara's group. One demonstrates a machine that seems to produce music without being touched; the others discuss on-site demonstrations that the King can attend later. No-one seems to come with anything except new technologies they want supported by the royal treasury, but there must be other avenues for those pursuing justice. The King speaks to all of them with sincere interest, and no-one leaves dissatisfied.

The last petitioner in front of them leaves, and they all three move forward. Kara and Elizabeth kneel, and after a moment of hesitation von Toten does too. "My King," says Elizabeth, helping von Toten to his feet. "I have been to some very strange places, and seen some very strange things. This might take a while to explain."

The King looks over Kara and von Toten; their pale skin stands out here, and their clothing is not quite of this world. He says something that must be "Go on" or "I'm listening," waving a hand at Elizabeth.

"I found a strange door under one of the anthropology buildings at the Royal Academy," Elizabeth continues. "When I went through it and looked back, it had vanished. I was trapped underground, in a place that I now know was nowhere in our world. After wandering for almost a week I stumbled on the place where Kara and Professor von Toten were living, and they took me in. They come from a continent called Europe, where their country is at war, and they got lost underground trying to flee from soldiers. Professor von Toten is a gifted engineer! He built a machine that makes food—" this was what they had agreed to tell the King "—and a teletransporter that can move a person instantly from place to place."

Von Toten hands her one of the teletransporters and she quickly opens the panel to set the destination. When she vanishes and reappears five feet away the King stands up in excitement. He asks a question, and Elizabeth answers, "Of course!"

Only after almost half an hour of excitement over testing von Toten's creations does Elizabeth finally have the opportunity to mention her own discoveries. She struggles to explain the different layers of reality she can see, demonstrates her ability to walk through walls, but cannot propose any real use for it. Kara can think of hundred of uses, but she is not the one with the ability, and Elizabeth still does not know that Kara is a spy.

After nearly an hour the King yields to one of his guards, who Elizabeth says has asked him to hear the impatient petitioners in line. He calls someone to find them somewhere to stay and promises to meet with them tomorrow, in his study. He ends by clasping Elizabeth's hand in both of his, smiling brightly at her. Elizabeth seems dazed and starstruck as they're led to a suite of guest rooms. "I never imagined that _I_ would be able to offer the King anything!" she says, turning in a full circle as she walks. "He's really interested! But it's all thanks to you, Professor!"

"Am I the one who taught you to walk through walls?"

"In a sense, yes," says Elizabeth, and laughs. "Oh, we get to stay in the palace! That's really something, isn't it?"

Kara waits until they reach the guest rooms to ask Elizabeth about language lessons. She relays the request to the person who led them here—a servant?—who promises to find a teacher. Kara has no reason to attend the private meeting with the King tomorrow, though she does feel uneasy about the possibility of his taking advantage of von Toten, who didn't consider until far too late that his ability to create a fully functional aeroplane from nothing could be used to make war. After all, if the King is taking advantage of von Toten, how will she?

Her exit strategy, though, has grown more complicated. She cannot get home without Elizabeth's help, unless she is willing to wait until von Toten creates a machine that can replicate her ability. This means that she will almost certainly need to threaten Elizabeth, but Elizabeth is stubborn and moral in a way that might lead her to choose death over cooperation. Perhaps trickery would be more appropriate; Elizabeth is more trusting than she is cowardly. For now, Kara will learn how to make her way in the Fourth Dynasty, and bide her time.

\---

"It's impossible to find you!" Elizabeth's breathless voice exclaims from somewhere behind Kara. She turns and finds Elizabeth leaning out the window of the bell tower. "How did you get down there?"

"I got up here," says Kara. "Climbed the side of the building. What are you doing here?"

"Looking for you! I figured I'd find you perching on a roof somewhere like the gargoyle you are, but there are a lot of rooves in this city."

"Don't try to climb down the bell tower," says Kara as Elizabeth swings her leg out over the sill. "It's going to end badly."

"I think there are enough cracks in the stonework," says Elizabeth. As she starts climbing Kara approaches across the tiled roof, watching for her to fall. And she does fall, from about halfway down. Kara rushes to catch her, cannot roll on such a steep incline, and ends up sliding almost to the edge of the roof, badly bruising her knees and one elbow.

"Kara! I'm so sorry, are you all right?"

Kara sighs and levers herself up against the wall, making sure to stay between Elizabeth and the edge. "I told you it would end badly. What are you here for?"

"I'm really sorry." Elizabeth dusts off her knees and takes the hand Kara offers her. "I thought I could make it. Er, well, what I wanted to say is that since I'm an anthropologist... I'm trying to finish my degree, and I was hoping I could write my thesis on the process of cross-layer anthropology. The King also asked me to find out more about the place where you come from. He said your account would be the crown jewel of the Royal Library."

Kara doesn't think a treatise on the process of cross-layer anthropology is likely to be useful to anyone aside from Elizabeth, but she does want to earn the King's trust. "All right," she says. There is a silence, during which Elizabeth starts to climb laboriously back up to the top of the roof. "How is von Toten?"

Elizabeth laughs. "You're not going to ask how I am? Well, he's doing wonderfully. He's working on urbanism in the Ministry of the Interior now, since he wants nothing to do with machines of war. The King wants to build inside the Subnet—subterranean tunnel network, they're calling it the Subnet now—and see if new undiscovered science can be done there. I think our dear Professor is trying to invent a completely new style of architecture with his new friends in the urbanism department! You remember the locations where we found those hovering bricks and bells? He's trying to replicate that purposefully. Can you imagine? A floating palace!" Elizabeth is walking now across the ridge of the roof, arms held out for balance. "Gardens in the sky... you should see some of the plans we drew up. I've never imagined anything so beautiful."

Kara has nothing to say about this. Certainly it has nothing to do with her. She's less hopeful every day that she will be able to extract von Toten from this place and return in triumph to France. Her debt to her mother country still burns in her, but these days the fire is banked. If it isn't in any of the seven worlds Elizabeth can see, how could she return? But she cannot bear to give her loyalty entirely to the Fourth Dynasty, either.

"How are your Huin lessons going?" Elizabeth asks. She looks over her shoulder and begins to tilt, and so quickly turns back again.

"I like to think my progress is adequate," Kara replies. 

"Were you... just now were you properly speaking Huin? It's almost impossible to tell! It's astonishing that you learned to be fluent so quickly!"

"I've learned a lot of languages. It's an important skill for me."

Elizabeth stops and turns around to look at her. "Why? You never said what it was you did in Europe."

"I was a diplomat, of sorts. Not an ambassador to one country; I travelled to many places. I speak seven European languages aside from French."

"I'm torn. I ought to tell you to go to the linguistics department and let them make recordings, but they'll never let you go if you do."

"It seems I already have an engagement with the anthropology department anyway," says Kara, and this makes Elizabeth smile broadly.

"That's right. You can think of giving the linguists a turn once I've published my thesis. I've missed you, you know. I didn't think I would, since you've never said much, but it's a bit like being under the open sky again after all that time in the Subnet. I miss always knowing there's a wall at my back."

Kara doesn't; she would have gone insane surrounded by walls, and the ability to disappear into the wide world is as integral to her as her blood. But she nods. Elizabeth tilts her head to the side and watches Kara, but whatever she was looking for she doesn't seem to find it. After a moment she says, "Hm," and turns to continue walking across the roof.

"I have no idea how I'm going to get down from here," she says at last.

\---

"Do you have a favorite kind of tea?" Elizabeth asks her.

"I'll drink whatever you put in front of me," Kara says. She is cataloguing the exits: two wide second-story windows, the unlocked front door, and a staircase that she assumes leads to Elizabeth's bedroom. Elizabeth seems to take this for admiring her furnishings because she says, 

"I hope you like it. Some of this stuff was a lot of work to get so quickly! It's only just started feeling like home, but then, I did only move in two months ago."

Elizabeth prefers to conduct interviews in her own sitting room, which is lined with bookshelves and draped with textiles from every country in this world. Almost as soon as Kara came in a pot of tea was steaming on the table. Elizabeth puts an almost comical amount of effort into making her home welcoming. Kara's own small apartment in Orléans was bare yellowing plaster, a table with one chair, and an ancient creaking metal bed. She couldn't think of a reason to put in the effort, because it made no different to her and she never invited anyone. Elizabeth's confusion of colorful objects feels no more like home to her than any other kind of room, but she wishes that she knew how to _look_ at home. She had to master 'relaxed' or she would never make a decent spy, but it was always skulking she excelled at, not false identities and meetings at galas.

"If you don't like it you can say so," says Elizabeth. She sounds amused. "You look like you're meeting the King."

"It's lovely," says Kara.

"Don't make fun of me. I've never seen any furniture for sale made for perching on like you prefer to. Perhaps I should borrow a crate from Professor von Toten?"

Kara raises an eyebrow and says nothing. How could Elizabeth tell the compliment was insincere?

Elizabeth cocks her head, smiling faintly as she looks at Kara. It's disquieting to be the subject of such frank and focused regard. At last she says, "I can't imagine what kind of décor you would prefer."

"I don't care much what a house looks like," says Kara. "Shall we begin?"

\---

She visits von Toten at his office in the Department of the Interior. She tries to time it so that he'll be getting off work, but he's the type of person who always has one more thing to finish and goes home in the end long after dark. He seems too engrossed to hear her approaching.

"Von Toten," she says, standing in his office doorway.

"Oh! Kara! Come in, please sit down. Clear off a chair if you must, nobody ever bothers to sit down in here. They're always asking me to do something, dropping off paperwork, picking up paperwork. I can't find anything. Half of my blueprints seem to be missing." It's incredible that he can lay the situation out in that sequence and find nothing suspicious in it. He looks under a loose stack of notes, which slides off his desk, and gives Kara a hopeless look.

Kara picks up the papers from the armchair and begins squaring them. "Ask for filing cabinets," she says. "Then it will be obvious if someone has been tampering."

"Why would anyone bother to tamper with my work," von Toten mutters. "What good does it do them? The kingdom benefits in the end no matter who presents it."

"Then you already have suspicions that someone else is taking credit for your work."

"Yes, and I know who, but it doesn't matter! I'm not hard up for money. I want to see my work used for good, and it will be. Don't go after anyone, Kara. I know you aren't the vengeful type, especially not on my behalf. Did you come to threaten my colleagues, or did you come to tell me something?"

"Elizabeth wanted me to invite you to her graduation ceremony. She's very busy with her thesis and she think you have too much mail to read all of it."

Von Toten sighs. "I don't even know where my mail is at this point. Of course I'll come. When is it?"

Kara hands him the card. "I'm not responsible if you lose track of it."

"I know!" He pins it to the edge of the cork board over his desk. "Thank you, Kara, I'll be delighted to attend."

"How is progress on the Winter Palace?" Kara asks. She places the neat stack of notes on the chair and begins on the desk. "I've heard that construction will start soon."

"You're well-informed! Yes, Henry and I stress-tested our stabilizer a few days ago and it seems perfectly safe to walk and even build on hovering material. The King was thrilled, of course. I find it more exciting that the material's own weight is no longer a constraint—think about a long bridge that doesn't need supports."

Kara listens patiently to von Toten's lecture on the properties of weightless matter. By the time he's run out of steam the office is looking considerably neater, and Kara has sat down to organize the notes by date. "I'll come with you when you move to the Winter Palace," she says. He looks at her in surprise. "I don't have any job here other than ensuring your safety. The King lets me live in his city on sufferance, so I should make myself useful. And clearly you have enemies here, even if you don't think it matters."

"I won't tell you not to come," says von Toten. "It's always nice to have a friendly face around."

And, of course, Kara needs to be back in the Subnet if she ever wants to return to France.

\---

"What was school like there?"

"Half-hearted. It wasn't required, so I only attended occasionally. After I learned to read and write I didn't see much point in it."

"What did you do instead?"

Kara studies Elizabeth, trying to decide whether to tell the truth. Most likely, Elizabeth won't be surprised by it, though she might pretend to be. "I was a thief. That's why I'm so good at climbing. I ran messages for street gangs, sometimes, or acted as a lookout. Most often I pickpocketed. The police reforms in... 1889, I think, made it harder, so I apprenticed to a locksmith, and then became a courier for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I'm not sure exactly what was taught in primary school, because everyone I knew either didn't go or had secondary schooling."

"Did you have any kind of formal schooling to learn the other languages you knew? Was there training at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs?"

Kara almost laughs. "They gave me a train ticket to Stuttgart and a German dictionary."

"But you had contacts in Germany—other members of your diplomatic corps?"

Right. Kara really isn't very good at lying, and she half-forgot which lie she told Elizabeth. "They didn't have time to give me lessons. They were working diplomats. And it's more efficient to learn from native speakers. After the first few languages it was easier. European languages fall into a few families."

Elizabeth taps her pen against her teeth and looks at Kara with her head tilted sideways, which means she is trying to figure something out. Kara raises one eyebrow, and Elizabeth shrugs. "Do you know anything about German schools?"

\---

When Kara begins to spend more time in the Ministry of the Interior, running messages and errands for von Toten, she comes to know more about how the ministers see cross-layer émigrés. When she talks, which is not often, people seem to have difficulty hearing her. Despite her large black coat, sometimes they do not seem to see her in the halls, either. No-one else in the Ministry has been accidentally bumped so many times, spilling the paperwork out of their arms, except possibly von Toten. Kara has taken to carrying only enclosed items and well-secured paperwork. She does take some private enjoyment in how easy it is to unnerve these people, though: she only has to look at them for a few seconds, memorizing their faces and the names pinned to their chests, and they will swallow nervously and hurry away. 

Once, and only once, does someone try to knock over von Toten while she is with him. She stops him from falling and grabs the arm of the man who knocked into him.

"Sorry about that," the man says. He tries to shake off Kara's grip, but it is too tight.

"It would be a more appropriate apology to remedy the damage you've caused," says Kara. Her grip tightens more and the man, looking frightened, stoops to help von Toten pick up his papers.

"You should use the packets I bought you," Kara tells von Toten. "You wouldn't keep losing your paperwork."

"It's such a bother to put them all in if I'm only going to take them out again," he says.

"Is it also a bother to pick them up every time someone feels like bullying you?"

He doesn't have an answer for that. He does, however, start using the packets.

Kara has been noting down all the people who take action against herself or von Toten. Firstly, she finds that nothing intimidates them more than seeing her taking notes about them. Secondly, she is looking for patterns. She knows von Toten's work well enough now that it becomes clear from attending presentations to the King who has been stealing it. Those people are not on the list of petty bullies. They are cordial to von Toten whenever they see him in the halls, although they ignore Kara.

She has been asked not to threaten them or take any other action, but she takes careful notes against the day when von Toten decides he's had enough. She also takes notes on who spreads the rumors that von Toten isn't pulling his weight despite the generous sanctuary and funding the King has provided him. These are also not the people stealing his work. They don't want to be publicly associated with the rumors.

For the most part, however, von Toten seems happy. His protégé and partner, Henry o'Toole, is not among the thieves—or if he is, he is far too subtle for Kara. This is unlikely. He enjoys his work and is genuinely cordial with at least a few of his colleagues.

In spring of 1831 (forty-seven years by numerical count before Kara will be born, though that doesn't mean much in a different layer) construction begins on the Winter Palace. Von Toten's illuminated doorway, blown up to colossal size, allows entrance into what appears to be a dungeon, and the construction crew begins to demolish it. Outside the bounds of its walls is not earth but the blank black space that surrounded the room where Kara first encountered von Toten's thought machine. Only Kara and von Toten recognize it. The construction workers cry out in alarm and scramble back away. So Kara, despite how much she loathes the void, takes up a fallen hammer and starts destroying the rest of the wall herself.

The shovels are returned to the Ministry's warehouses, and the stabilization machine for weightless material is wheeled forward.

\---

This time Elizabeth finds her sitting on top of the completed archway that will be the entrance to the Winter Palace once von Toten works out how to create doorways without a wall. For now, it is empty, and Elizabeth looks up with her hands on her hips. "How on Earth do you get up there?" she asks. Kara vaults down and then demonstrates, which doesn't seem to satisfy Elizabeth in the slightest. She climbs back down and leans against the side of the arch, waiting.

"They don't need my help here," Elizabeth says. She gestures down the path at the platform the construction crew is putting together, which will hold a central courtyard and garden. "I just wanted to wait until I was sure the construction would be all right."

Kara nods. She knew this already.

"And I have already bought all the equipment I'll need." Elizabeth pauses again as if she is waiting for something, but Kara doesn't know what. "So I'll be leaving tomorrow, with my team."

"Are you trying to invite me to a party?" Kara asks.

"No. No, we already had the goodbye party. I knew you wouldn't want to come. So I came to say goodbye personally. I'll miss you."

"It's going to be difficult to be in the Subnet for so long," Kara says.

"Well, they need me. Nobody else has my unique qualifications." She holds up her hand and it blurs into seven hands, each glowing faintly in a different color. "Are you sure you want to stay here?"

"What good will I be in the Subnet?"

"What good are you at politicking?" Elizabeth counters. "You're very good at solving problems—you know, puzzles, traps, that kind of thing. The problems in the Subnet."

"No-one else is going to help von Toten if someone tries to assassinate him."

Elizabeth's eyes widen. "Is that likely? Has someone already—"

"Not yet. Investigation is still ongoing."

"By which you mean you're investigating it alone."

"Who else is going to?"

Elizabeth puffs out an irritated breath through her nose and leans against the other side of the archway. "I understand. You can't come with me. I don't want Karl to get hurt either. Take care of him."

"Take care of yourself," says Kara. "You're not a naturally careful person, and I have no reason to trust your team."

Elizabeth starts forward and her hands make an abortive gesture as if she's about to reach for Kara, and then she clasps them in front of her. "I'll do my best," she says softly. "I can't afford to be careless without you to watch my back, after all."

\---

Kara's rooms in the Winter Palace are next to von Toten's, in what the residents have started to call the research dormitory. She doesn't like him so close to certain detractors, but they'll both have to live with it. Now that basic construction is mostly complete, von Toten and o'Toole have moved on to analyzing some of the devices found inside the Subnet by Elizabeth's teams. They spend more time in the laboratory than at their drafting tables. Sections of it are cordoned off, filled with floating chunks of rubble, small glowing items, and vials of as-yet-unidentified luminescent liquid. Kara weaves through and around them without giving them much thought. She doesn't need to understand why the Subnet acts the way it does. What she needs is to talk to von Toten.

Right now he's discussing something with o'Toole as they examine something under a microscope. Kara stands behind them, watching, until o'Toole turns enough to catch her silhouette. He jumps backward in surprise, knocking over a stool and a pile of bricks, and then places his hand on his chest.

"Miss d'Orléans," he says (it isn't her name, but she had to put something on her residency forms). "I wish you would make some noise when you move."

"Many people would like that," she says. "Von Toten, I'd like to talk to you."

"Go on," he says. She cuts her eyes toward o'Toole and von Toten sighs. "Kara, I trust Henry with anything you could have to say to me. We're partners."

She remains silent until von Toten gets up with another irritated sigh and goes to follow her out of the room. "Sorry, Henry," he says. "I'll be back shortly."

Out in the hall he whispers, "Kara, what is it?"

"I've been investigating."

"Well, aren't you always?"

"I've been investigating your office. I found evidence there that you are selling the results of your research under the table to the Northern Kingdom." She can see that he's about to protest, which is irritating because he should know by now that she would never both to accuse him of anything. "Obviously it was planted," she adds, because otherwise he'll make a fuss. "And thanks to the surveillance I've been conducting, I have photographs of Doctor Gehr planting it."

"And you—you want my permission before submitting this? It doesn't do any harm if we caught him and removed the planted evidence. Please—"

"Von Toten, this is a matter of national security. I'm not asking your permission to tell the King about it. I'm informing you so that when you're called to testify you don't try to cover up for him. It won't do him any good, and the process will be easier if you can present evidence that he's been stealing your work."

"I... I don't know what I would present..."

Kara sighs silently through her nose. "I can recommend some. I'd rather you didn't look like a hapless fool in court. It will only lead more people to think they can take advantage of you." Before he can say anything else inane she adds, "I'm going to the Ministry of Justice today. You should expect a summons in the next two weeks."

Maybe she should have told o'Toole. Gehr has been taking credit for his work too, and he seems a little less irritatingly good-natured than von Toten. A little.

\---

Sometimes Kara questions her decision to remain with von Toten. The likelihood that she'll ever find a way home is vanishingly small, and by the time she does the war will likely be over anyway. Not that there isn't always espionage to do; Kara knows that there is. France could become a global superpower with a fraction of what von Toten knows, even with only Kara's interpretation of his stolen notes. But, disquietingly, Kara no longer feels the burning desire she once did to find a way home at any cost. These days her first concern is for the stability of her adoptive kingdom. It's a self-serving concern, but she knows it's more than that too.

Her loyalty is to the King. Infuriatingly she is even loyal to von Toten, her previously disposable pawn. It would just be too big a waste if he died now.

The years pass by now in twos and threes. Agent Kara, spy and bodyguard. Kara, bodyguard and research assistant. Kara d'Orléans, research assistant and head of security at the Winter Palace. She foils minor plots against von Toten, against o'Toole, against the Minister of the Interior. She fails to foil plots and finds her charges losing face in the eyes of the King and their people. She wakes up every morning to lamplight because no sun rises on the Winter Palace. She patrols on the edge of the void, she escapes to the bright-skied capitol, she returns to blackness at the end of the day.

She meets wanderers and scholars from out of the Subnet, and this is perhaps the most interesting part of her job. Nobody, she has come to believe, gets stuck in the Subnet by accident. It takes a certain kind of person: curious, driven, a little self-absorbed. It ate up Kara along with von Toten, and that's why she's the only one who doesn't belong here.

Many of the people from the Subnet, who followed signs left by Elizabeth's exploration teams, are more than glad to stay. The Winter Palace is a haven for people of science, and an impossible dream for anyone who has been trapped in the Subnet for any length of time. Many of the people from out of the Subnet do not remember where they came from, and some have forgotten even their names.

Murtaugh is an exception.

He arrived in summer of 1835 drunk on the thrill of discovery and his own sevenfold arm. It's clear that he was expecting to be something no-one had ever seen before, so when Kara greeted him at the docks and told him the linguistics department would be interested to see him he was a little put out.

"I know things that will revolutionize our understanding of the universe," he insisted. "I know what links the seven layers of reality—sorry, I should slow down."

"We know about the seven layers of reality," said Kara. "Perhaps you should visit the library. It has an extensive section on karma theory and weightless materials." When his face remained carefully blank she continued, "Karma is the blue or white energy source that stabilizes connections between layers." At that his face opened, and a little uncertainty showed on his face, so she pushed further. "But I'm just the head of security. I don't know much about it."

He spent a week in the library devouring all the literature on karma theory, and then went after o'Toole, who authored almost half of it. Kara wasn't paying much attention to petty dramas that didn't affect public safety, so she wasn't sure of the details, but after a few more weeks Murtaugh moved on to the mathematics department, leaving o'Toole more irritable than before.

The mathematics department must not have found him impressive either because he left the Winter Palace altogether two weeks after that. Kara was privately relieved. She was sure he would create trouble if he stayed.

\---

She has enough trouble in the next eight years as the accusations against von Toten become more and more credible. The people who inexplicably loathe him seem finally to have hired agents of their own who can match Kara for paranoia. They let him defend himself but leave doubt; he's being set up as clever enough to evade accusations but still suspect. Kara would be a fool not to realize that something much worse is coming for him. But aside from looking into other researchers in the Winter Palace, what can she do?

It comes to a head in 1844 when they make an attempt on the King's life.

Kara isn't there when it happens. She's investigating Doctor deGray's office while she's out giving a lecture. DeGray is on the short list of possible suspects for the repeated attempts to paint von Toten in a suspicious light, so Kara has been waiting for an opportunity to scour her office.

Like a good conspirator, deGray has been diligent about destroying the evidence, but she does have one strange thing: a slip of paper with nothing but an address and a time, behind her desk as if she dropped it and forgot about it. At that address there are traces of a temporary base: a tin of lubricant, a rag, a crumpled map with a route traced on it. It fills Kara with a sense of urgency. What is the significance of that route?

Kara doesn't have time to acquire an automobile through legal means, so she steals one that's parked on a narrow deserted street nearby and speeds through the capitol. The circled area is out in the countryside, in a hilly area with patches of scrubby forest perfect for hiding a sniper.

By the time she gets there they've already orchestrated von Toten's arrest. Conveniently the Minister of Finance was returning from another city along the same road and found the King unconscious in von Toten's arms with blood gushing over his shirt, a pistol nearby poorly concealed in the grass. Kara is deputized to rush the King to the hospital, and von Toten is left in the Minister's car with his hands bound in packing twine.

The King dies in the hospital two days later, and the Western Kingdom is thrown into chaos.

Normally the King would give some notice that he was abdicating, and there would be time to vote for a new king from among the Ministers. Now everyone is clamoring for a different interim King, von Toten's trial is postponed, and no-one has yet been able to organize an election.

Kara knows how this is going to play out. Von Toten will commit convenient suicide in prison before the trial, deGray's friend the Minister of Justice will impose military rule on the capitol to keep the peace during this difficult time, and the new King will be the one who protects the ballot-counting houses. Kara isn't staying to watch it happen.

Breaking out of prison is much easier from the outside. She incapacitates a couple of guards, steals a uniform and a set of keys, and takes him out as if she's supposed to be doing it.

"Kara," he whispers. "We don't need to do this. You have evidence that will exonerate me!"

"I have evidence that the Minister of Justice will say was faked. It would have been easy to do so if I was part of your plot to kill the King. If we don't leave now, we're both going to die within the week."

Von Toten has no response. He lets her smuggle him into the Winter Palace to find the layer-travel prototype device he's been working on, or a teletransporter, anything. They manage to sneak past three patrols of police, but it's the fourth one where von Toten's lungs fail. He cannot sustain the quiet barely sufficient breathing Kara has tried to train him in—he's nearly seventy years old. He gasps for breath, and one of the police looks around in time to see him and Kara pressed against a wall.

Kara grabs his wrist and drags him into a run, but he's too slow. He's not as agile as she is, and even she can't dodge a bullet.

"Get out of here!" he gasps. His trembling hands clutch the lapels of her coat and try to shove her away. It galls her to have to abandon him like this, but she can't carry him.

"Goodbye, Professor," she says, and she runs.

\---

Kara truly hates the Subnet. It doesn't follow the rules that are natural to her, the laws of gravity and border checkpoints and the sun. At every turn it curtails her freedom. She is careful to make sure she always knows her way back to the Winter Palace, because eventually they will stop expecting her, and that is when she will strike.

The Winter Palace is also the place where she has lived for almost twelve years, and it's difficult to abandon it.

She skulks at the edge of the Subnet Core, a ways away from established teletransporters. Two search parties come through looking for her, but they don't have layer travel capabilities, and they're easy enough to avoid. She waits two weeks after the second search party, and when no more come, she returns to the Winter Palace.

It's abandoned.

Not, apparently, in haste. The library and many of the laboratories have been cleaned out. Someone has taken much of von Toten's work, and she suspects that it wasn't o'Toole. There's no sign of where he might be either. All of the exits into the Western Kingdom have been closed. And there is something strange about it. Not all of the teleporters lead to where she remembers, and parts of the gardens are disintegrating into the void. There are new portals that spin sickeningly and glow with karmic energy, shattering the substance of the architecture. It only takes half a day before she is more than ready to leave the Winter Palace before it crumbles any further. Now that she can travel between layers on her own, she has no need to return to the Western Kingdom, which is either a quasi-dictatorship or engaged in civil war. She can leave the Subnet and go anywhere she wants.

The sound of a quiet footstep behind her. She whirls and shoots before she's seen who it is, because she's on edge and there's no-one here she wants alive more than dead.

Elizabeth blurs and splits, and the bullet takes a chunk out of the stonework behind her. Kara nearly drops her gun. "Elizabeth," she says. "I... didn't think you would be coming back."

"Kara? Kara, my G-d! What happened here? Are you all right?"

Kara thinks it's rather strange for her to be asking whether Kara is all right, considering that she just shot Elizabeth. "Von Toten is dead," she says. "The King is dead. The Western Kingdom is most likely at war with itself."

Elizabeth looks more than twelve years older than the last time Kara saw her. She already looked tired. Hearing that, she looks exhausted. "Tell me what happened," she says. "In detail. I need to sit down."

She sits with Kara on the edge of a dry fountain, and Kara tells her in detail. Elizabeth puts her head in her hands, leaning over her knees. She looks like she's in pain. If Kara were anyone else she would put her arm around Elizabeth, because Elizabeth needs comfort. She thinks of the day Elizabeth discovered her ability to travel between layers, huddled against a crate with von Toten's arm around her shoulders and a mug of... something, Kara can't remember. His touch was so clearly all that was anchoring her into reality.

Kara puts a tentative hand on Elizabeth's shoulder. She startles and looks up, and then smiles tiredly. She puts her hand over Kara's and squeezes it.

"Why are you here, now?" Kara asks her.

"A lot has happened," she says, and laughs. "There's someone else like me in the Subnet. Someone who can travel freely through time and space and shift between layers at will."

"Murtaugh," says Kara. Elizabeth looks surprised. "He came here a long time ago. I think he left because he hated not being the smartest person in the Palace."

"Yes. he joined my exploration team, and for a while we were friends. I was a mentor to him. But he wouldn't be constrained by rules about ethical conduct. He was only interested in understanding everything about the Subnet. His reckless disregard for the stability of the Subnet has gotten a lot of people killed. They hate him. I honestly thought they might be here—I wanted to warn them that he's finally decided to come after them. But this place isn't the haven it once was. I'll have to look for them elsewhere." She stands and offers a hand to Kara, who takes it. "Let's go back to my ship. Plan our next move. I need to think about where they might be right now."

Elizabeth's ship is docked near the observatory, a large battered and pitted bronze thing of indeterminate shape, which looks suited neither for travel through water nor through air. But the void between locations in the Subnet is neither. Kara has no idea how this ship might propel itself. That doesn't matter. She follows Elizabeth up to the bridge, and a study of sorts, and stands behind Elizabeth's chair as she sits down and pulls a stack of notes toward her.

Elizabeth wears reading glasses now. They suit her. She's changed; not only does she look older and tireder, but she moves with a deliberate grace that indicates she is finally at home in her body, unlike the gawky twenty-something Kara met fourteen years ago. Elizabeth knows now exactly who she is. Kara would almost rather she had been able to hold onto her naïveté. It's clear that she has suffered for her certainty.

"Sit down, there's another chair over there by the wheel. You don't have to stand behind me like a bodyguard."

"I am a bodyguard."

"Don't be absurd. Bodyguards can sit. You must be almost forty by now, I'm not going to make you stand for hours while I look through my notes. I'll get you a chair if you're too stubborn."

Kara fetches a chair and watches Elizabeth pore over her notes, making searching gestures with her hands every so often in the air. After a while Kara gets up and seals the hatch they came up through, because knowing it's open behind her has been making her jumpy.

At last Elizabeth says, "They're in the fifth layer. Not here, but not too far away. We can—"

And then she stops, because they can clearly hear footsteps on the rungs of the ladder. Elizabeth looks up at Kara, wide-eyed, and then turns to scribble a note. Kara gathers up the papers on her desk and rolls them into a tube. "What's the plan?" she asks in a low voice. Something is knocking on the inside of the hatch.

"There's an escape—" Elizabeth begins, but she's interrupted by the sound of gunfire. Holes pepper the other side of the bridge, nearer to the hatch, and one of the windows shatters. Kara grips Elizabeth by the shoulders and moves her so that she is between Elizabeth and the window.

"An escape?"

"Dammit. They must have come back after I warned them. Stubborn asses. There's an escape pod. Follow me."

\---

"You know I really used not to like you. I think you make yourself hard to like on purpose."

Kara does. She says, "I have no need or desire to be liked. Only to be useful."

"You are. I know you think you failed, but you're only one woman. You saved Karl countless times before his enemies caught up with him. Without him, how much less would the Fourth Dynasty have achieved?" Kara nods, and tries to keep still as she feels the tweezers enter her back. 

"It didn't go very deep," Elizabeth says eventually. "Might have taken a chip out of your ribcage, though. Did you know they were seven-layer bullets?"

"I've never heard of seven-layer bullets."

Elizabeth sighs and squeezes Kara's other shoulder. "Kara," she says, and nothing else.

Kara watches her own lap and concentrates on the feeling of Elizabeth's hands on her bare back so she won't be concentrating on the pain. Elizabeth's hands are not gentle; she imagines that Elizabeth at twenty-two would have been too gentle, even tentative. Elizabeth at thirty-five has picked bullets out of wounds before.

"Rubbing alcohol," she says, and Kara doesn't flinch when she dabs it into the wound. "Do you want me to sew it up, or just slap a gauze pad on it?"

"Do you have suture thread?"

"Of course."

"Then yes."

There is silence in the escape pod for a while, other than the tiny sounds of Elizabeth's sleeve as she sews. The predictable points of pain dissolving into local anesthetic are almost soothing. Kara relaxes under Elizabeth's hands and begins to feel tired. Elizabeth is the only person in the Subnet or on any world that she can trust. Elizabeth is the only person who trusts her. It should be frightening that if Elizabeth brought her back to France and said she needed the President dead, Kara would do it. But Kara cannot be frightened of Elizabeth, despite her godlike power. Despite her power over Kara.

When gauze is taped over the wound she leans back and rests her head on Elizabeth's shoulder, eyes closed. "Wake me when we get there," she says.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is one translation of a concept that I got from [this meta post](https://hunxi-guilai.tumblr.com/post/612161034673946624/all-right-guys-lets-have-a-conversation-about) on the relationships between people of service and their patrons. I hope the connection to Agent Kara is obvious.
> 
> Also I realize it says in CF4 that she's in MI6 but I simply do not care to make her British. I think that sucks.


End file.
